Tag Archives: EPA

Privacy: News the EPA is conducting surveillance on farmers goes against our grain. Freedom means freedom of movement and the presumption of innocence. How can we have it if every move is monitored by government?

Nebraska’s congressional delegation sent a justifiably angry letter to Administrator Lisa Jackson last week complaining that her Environmental Protection Agency had exceeded its legislative and constitutional authority by conducting drone surveillance flights over Nebraska and Iowa farms looking for violations of the Clean Water Act.

“They are just way on the outer limits of any authority they’ve been granted,” said Nebraska GOP Sen. Mike Johanns, an opinion the bureaucrats rejected Friday in responding to the letter. The EPA argues that the courts, including the Supreme Court, have already authorized aerial surveillance, such as taking aerial photographs of a chemical manufacturing facility.

“Farmers and ranchers in Nebraska pride themselves in the stewardship of our state’s natural resources,” says the letter signed by Republican Reps. Adrian Smith, Jeff Fortenberry and Lee Terry, as well as Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson and Johanns.

“As you might imagine, this practice has resulted in privacy concerns among our constituents and raises several questions.”

Smith, co-chairman of the Modern Agriculture Caucus and the Congressional Rural Caucus, said Tuesday the operations in many cases are near homes so “landowners deserve legitimate justification given the sensitivity of the information gathered by the flyovers.”

America is awash in surveillance cameras, from red-light cameras at intersections to cameras in and outside businesses. For the most part, we tolerate their intrusiveness if the pictures are triggered by actual lawbreakers or are in a public place for legitimate security purposes where the expectation of privacy does not exist.

But a drone flying over farmer Jones’ farmhouse seems a stretch that sets a dangerous precedent.

A federal policy promotes the use of drones by local law enforcement, and drone manufacturers are now pushing their products to the nation’s 18,000 police jurisdictions. This raises the question of whether drones will be allowed to capture information normally requiring a search warrant authorized by a judge?

Syndicated columnist and IBD contributor Charles Krauthammer calls drones instruments of war suited for war. They should not be used domestically, he says.

He notes that you can hear a police helicopter but not a drone over your house, and argues that “the first guy who uses a Second Amendment weapon to bring a drone down that’s been hovering over his house is going to be a folk hero in this country.”

This is not the crazy urban legend of black helicopters roaming about. “We’ve seen in some records that were released by the Air Force just recently, that under their rules, they are allowed to fly drones in public areas and record information on domestic situations,” says Jennifer Lynch, an attorney with the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Association, who is looking into various government surveillance techniques.

Under current guidelines, information gathered deliberately or accidentally by military drones over the U.S. can be kept by the military up to three months before being purged.

They can also be turned over to “another Department of Defense or government agency to whose function it pertains.” Presumably that includes Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of Justice.

“Our Founding Fathers had no idea that there would be remote-control drones with television monitors that can feed back live data instantaneously — but if they had, they would have made darn sure that these things were subject to the Fourth Amendment (protecting individual privacy),” Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, told Fox News.

It’s been said that those who sacrifice liberty for the sake of security will likely wind up with neither.

We agree with Mr. Krauthammer on drones surveilling American citizens: “Stop it here. Stop it now.”

Wow, just when you thought it couldn’t get more interesting – the Department of Homeland Security has released its latest document – Environmental Justice Strategy . First they order 450 million rounds of ammunition and now they have joined a Memorandum of Understanding on Environmental Justice (EJ MOU) to participate in government-wide environmental justice efforts. Are they planning another round of class warfare or are they anticipating the next American Revolution?

Beginning in 2012, DHS will provide a concise report on progress during the previous fiscal year toward achieving the goals of Executive Order 12898, signed by President Clinton in 1994. In a Presidential memorandum accompanying EO 12898, President Clinton identified Title VI as one of several federal laws already in existence that can help “to prevent minority communities and low-income communities from being subject to disproportionately high and adverse environmental effects.” The Executive Order was recently implemented by the Obama administration in several key governmental departments and agencies including, but not limited to, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Labor, the Department of Energy, the Department of Veteran’s Affairs and the Department of Health and Human Services.

What is Environmental Justice? “As described in the 2010 Quadrennial Homeland Security Review (QHSR), our Nation’s vision of homeland security is a homeland safe and secure, resilient against terrorism and other hazards, and where American interests and aspirations and the American way of life can thrive. In seeking to fulfill this vision, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) aspires to avoid burdening minority and low-income populations with a disproportionate share of any adverse human health or environmental risks associated with our efforts to secure the Nation. DHS joins with other departments and agencies to appropriately include environmental justice practices in our larger mission efforts involving federal law enforcement and emergency response activities.”

Another huge bureaucracy has been established for “Environmental Justice” thanks to the continued efforts of the current administration to control and implement environmental and socio-economic guidelines in accordance with Agenda 21 and income redistribution.

Two DHS headquarters offices, the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer OCAO) and the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL), will lead efforts to ensure the success of the Environmental Justice Strategy. There will be four additional headquarters offices to provide critical support for the activities of OCAO/OSEP and CRCL:

Office of the General Counsel provides legal advice, guidance, and review for all environmental justice policy.

Office of Policy ensures that mission-driven policies of the Department support the objectives and priorities set forth in the Environmental Justice Strategy, and provide a source of integration and analysis of policies.

In a speech at Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, AL, Lisa Jackson, EPA Chief, stated: “The EPA has a plan called Plan EJ 2014. Our goal, quite simply, is to make consideration of environmental justice and fairness part of EPA’s everyday decision-making. EPA has always had a special role with respect to environmental justice, but in this administration, President Obama has really revitalized the larger issue of environmental justice, in which other agencies as well as ours are playing important roles.”

I wonder what DHS and EPA have planned for the businesses and employers across America. Are they are going to allow environmental groups to claim their inhabitants are “unfairly” burdened by pollutants or adversely affected by new construction so that the businesses can be charged with creating environmental injustices? Will these businesses or the government then be ‘forced’ to subsidize or relocate the ‘victims’ in the name of ‘environmental justice’ or ‘fairness’? Will the government continue to seize land or prohibit construction under the guise of ‘environmental justice’? I think the administration is gearing up for another round of private sector destruction and redistribution of wealth – we need to stop it in November or we are in for one hell of a ride!

It’s a bad day for a liberal President when even Justice Ginsberg rules against you. Not only did the Obama Administration fail to convince the court’s only openly Marxist jurist serving on the bench, but they also have to live with the notion that she wrote the concurring opinion. This case marks the second time during Administration that President Obama has had one of his policies lose in the Supreme Court. While he is not the first President to find himself on the wrong side of the question of Constitutionality, he is still 0 for 2. This is not the record we would have expected for a person who was marketed to the country as a, “Constitutional Scholar.”

His first smack down came in January of this year if you will remember, when a 9 to 0 decision said basically that Barack Obama, or any President does not have the authority to tell churches who they could and could not hire based on the religious leanings of the church. In that case, a Lutheran Church ran a private school, and made the decision to hire as teachers, only those people that they felt would be good role models for passing on the Lutheran message as it pertains to all things educational. In other words, they wanted their teachers to be Christians, and to pass those beliefs on to their students. This is what the parents who sent their kids to a Lutheran school wanted, and this is what the owners of the school wanted. President Obama disagreed. In Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church Vs. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, the court decided that a President was not allowed to violate the First Amendment because his ultimate goal is to put an end to the practice of any religion other than Islam in America, nor for any other reason that he might have.

Yesterday’s loss, which makes him Zero for Two, came in the form of Sackett vs. The Environmental Protection Agency. In this particular case, The EPA decided that they would prevent the Sackett’s from building a house on a piece of property that they owned. The EPA decided that the property consisted of, or was located on wetlands in Idaho. Here is where it gets dicey, they did not want to defend their position in court, and decided to dispense with the entire concept of due process. They thought a good way to do this would be to tell the Sacketts that they thought it was possible that their property was inappropriate to build a house on, and therefore they should stop while the EPA took and indefinite amount of time to consider the matter. They threatened to fine the Sacketts $35,000 per day for each day the Sacketts defied the order to stop building, and then further threatened to increase the fines to $70,000 per day if the Sacketts challenged them in court. Nice! So, for those of you keeping score at home, Little Barry read the Constitution and decided that the Fifth Amendment meant that he could circumvent Due Process by simply declaring that it was possible that a person was doing wrong without ever actually alleging it. Since the allegation was never actually made, then a fair and speedy trial would never be warranted, regardless of the fact that deprivation of property was ongoing, permanent, and beyond redress.

The Supreme Court yesterday did not agree. The decision was unanimous, not that the Sacketts could start building, but that due process must be granted. For those who believe that this decision was limited in scope, and therefore not terribly important, I disagree. It is a shot across the bow of a President who has been effectively creating law by executive fiat since he lost control of the Legislative Branch in January of 2011. Things that Obama does are making their way to the Supreme Court in rapid fashion, and I do not believe that to be an accident either. One other interesting thing to note here, he lost 9 to 0 on this one. Putting aside any of the idiotic claims that this man is somehow a Constitutional Scholar, in his two trips to the Supreme Court so far, he has a combined score of 18 against, and 0 in favor of himself. This does not exactly inspire confidence in his understanding of, or even his promise to uphold our founding document. By writing a concurring opinion, Justice Ginsberg, the farthest left member of the court basically told the man child President that he has gone too far. Removing Due Process prior to deprivation of Life, Liberty, or Property is the stuff that monarchs do to their subjects. This is not something Presidents do to their fellow citizens.

The bad news for President Obama is that this is not going to be his last trip to the Supreme Court. On Monday, he gets to go again, and this one will be a doozy.

Hot Air readers will recall the first time enviros decided to try this back door on gun control in August 2010, as Democrats approached a disastrous midterm. After getting petitioned to overrule law and declare itself a regulating agency on hunting, the EPA opened a comment period on the petition that would have ended two days before voters went to the polls. Within 72 hours, the EPA withdrew the petition, stating that it agreed with the NRA and the firearms industry that it “does not have the legal authority to regulate this type of product under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA),” and that they weren’t interested in seeking that authority, either.

Well, the enviros are back with another attempt to get the EPA to regulate ammunition (via Instapundit). Think they’re still disinterested in seeking that authority?

Citing risks to birds and to human health, roughly 100 environmental groups formally asked the federal Environmental Protection Agency this week to ban or at least impose limits on lead in the manufacturing of bullets and shotgun pellets for hunting or recreation.

The use of such ammo by hunters puts about 3,000 pounds of lead into the environment annually and causes the death of 20 million birds each year from lead poisoning, said Jeff Miller, a conservation advocate at one of the groups, the Center for Biological Diversity. Consumption of meat from animals that are shot with lead bullets also contributes unacceptable levels of the metal into people’s diets, Mr. Miller said in a phone interview.

The ban sought by environmental groups would not apply to ammunition used by law enforcement and the military. In addition to bullets and pellets used in hunting and recreational activity like range shooting, the petition seeks to limit the use of the metal in fishing tackle and weights.

The application to range shooting should be another tip-off. While some ranges are open-air, few if any wild animals would graze on the range to consume the spent rounds, and fewer yet would be around to consume them. They’re not interested in protecting the environment from lead; they want to use the EPA to make it much more difficult and expensive for gun owners to buy ammunition by having the agency seize the authority to regulate a key component of firearms.

I asked if the EPA would find an interest in expanding its authority to include hunting and range fishing with this second opportunity. I believe the answer will be no, since this is another election year, and the last thing Barack Obama and Democrats need is another reason for gun owners to organize even more enthusiastically against them. But if Obama wins a second term, don’t be surprised if the third time’s the charm.

Folks who stop at a slot machine in the Las Vegas airport between flights can usually risk the few dollars that will probably disappear, but the serious gambler—whether the stock market, the ponies, or cards—assesses the risk before they cash in their chips. Even then, they make miscalculations. That’s why they call it gambling.

Last week, Fred Krupp of the Environmental Defense Fund miscounted his cards when he claimed that new EPA regulations will “protect the IQ of countless of American kids and help clear the air for millions of Americans with asthma.” Citing the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards the EPA rolled out on December 21, that he said was 21 years in the making, his widely-published op-ed said that the US “has always had good sense when taking on hazardous substances in our environment.”

The first card Krupp lays down in support of his argument that the US has “good sense” is DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane)—which the Environmental Defense Fund’s (EDF) cofounder, Victor Yannacone, was instrumental in banning back in 1972. Using DDT as an example of “good sense,” Krupp says it was banned “after learning that the pesticide was killing birds of prey.” Even though the EDF sprang up in the late sixties with the single purpose of battling the use of DDT, it is surprising that he is still trying this old trick.

Since DDT was used in WWII to successfully control typhus and malaria, it has gone from winner to loser and back to winner again. In 1948, Dr. Paul Muller, the scientist who discovered the insecticidal properties of DDT, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work. The tables turned when Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring in 1962 and referenced experiments done that claimed DDT thinned birds’ eggshells. Ultimately, through the work of EDF, DDT was banned in 1972. Because of that decision, malaria has spread, and millions have died from it. Instead of eliminating the disease’s vector, the mosquito, drugs have been developed to treat the disease, and those drugs are now proving ineffective, as malaria has grown resistant to them.

Since then, additional studies have been done and the eggshell findings have been revisited. DDT wasn’t the problem it was once believed to be. In 2006, the World Health Organization declared that, DDT “will once again play a major role in its efforts to fight the disease.” DDT kills the mosquitos that spread the disease.

The world gambled on what seemed to be a sure thing—but it turned out to be just hysteria and propaganda. Millions have died from the bad bet.

In recent history, we’ve collectively bet on “sure things” and lost.

We once believed there was an energy shortage—but modern technology and resource expansion have created a global oil glut, and natural gas is so plentiful that it is currently priced at a two-year low. America is now a net exporter of fuel.

Renewable energy was a sure thing. Presidents Bush and Obama threw taxpayer dollars at it—but it hasn’t paid off. Solyndra (and others) have gone bankrupt, taking taxpayer dollars with them. First Solar was the single worst performer in the SPX in 2011. Biofuel production has fallen off while the production of traditional fuels is up.

The planet was said to be warming. It was thought to be a crisis. But before a global agreement could be signed to fix the problem, new studies were done, and data was found to be falsified. The cooking of the books became known as “climate-gate.” The earth began to cool on its own—warming and cooling as it has done for billions of years.

Now we may have “mercury-gate.” The EPA and the environmental groups pushing for the “21 years in the making” Mercury and Air Toxics Standards have not looked at all the data, and data that they have looked at is used selectively to draw the desired conclusions.

Krupp claims that current levels of mercury (a naturally occurring element) will damage the IQ of “countless American children,” leaving the reader with mental pictures of rooms full of special needs children. When, in fact, their study shows the estimated total IQ points lost nationwide to mercury contamination of fish consumed by humans is 510.8 IQ points (see ES-5, Table ES-3 “Estimated IQ benefits from HG reduction”). That’s not per person (or child). That’s not per state; it is the total national benefit: 511 (let’s be generous) IQ points saved at an estimated annual cost of $9.6 billion. So, nationwide, 500 children might lose one IQ point, or 1000 might lose a half a point.

Similar to the tactics used to push the climate-change agenda, the EPA has once again selected data to support its predetermined outcome—they’ve then launched an advertising campaign to sell the expensive plan to the public. In his analysis of the EPA’s study, Dr. Willie Soon says: “It ignored well-documented, respected, and readily available research that conflicted with its apparently predetermined outcome and agenda.”

To read Krupp’s op-ed, you’d believe that implementing the EPA’s findings—which will cause some coal-fueled power plants to be mothballed and raise energy costs for consumers and industry—will eliminate all mercury from the environment. According to the Soon study, this is not true. He says: “America’s coal-fired electrical generating units are responsible for approximately 0.5% of mercury found in the air Americans breathe. Even eliminating every milligram of this mercury will not affect or reduce the other 99.5% in America’s atmosphere.” Major sources include forest fires and volcanoes.

Once again, Americans are being forced to make a bad bet. The EPA would like us to spend $9.6 billion dollars (that is billion with a “B”) for a proposed saving in healthcare costs of $6 million (that is million with an “M”) and it doesn’t add up—especially when considering the conflicting data. Even an amateur gambler wouldn’t make that bet. The odds are against you.

When the first card Krupp played was pulled from his sleeve, there is no reason to trust anything else he says. With an annual salary of nearly half a million dollars, Fred Krupp can afford to gamble, but the US cannot. The EPA is on a binge, gambling with the heart of the US economy and making our citizens the losers.

As I have noted on more than one occasion, in recent years the United States EPA has been acting more and more like a revenue-generating arm of the government than an agency that’s actually interested in protecting human health and the environment. A recent story published in the New York Timesamply illustrates the point: fuel suppliers are being fined for failing to add a “green fuel” – cellulosic ethanol – that doesn’t actually exist into their gasoline blends.

Cellulosic ethanol has long been a particularly prized panacea among environmental groups. As any moonshiner knows, conventional ethanol has long been produced by fermenting naturally grown sugars. These sugars are readily available and relatively easy to get at in corn for example, which is why ethanol production plants commonly use corn as their feedstock. However, even Al Gore eventually realized that it was rather idiotic to take millions of acres of farmland out of food and feed production in order to “grow” a fuel that (in many gases) actually ends up on the deficit side of the energy ledger. Cellulosic ethanol theoretically addresses those concerns.

There are sugars theoretically available in cellulose, a naturally-occurring polymer found in all sorts of plant life. If you can figure out how to get at those sugars, then you can make ethanol out of things that don’t have a lot of intrinsic value and that don’t compete with food and feed crops, like tree trimmings and corn cobs. Unfortunately, getting at those particular sugars is (for a lot of reasons that would bore the heck out of the average reader) extremely difficult. Like the Chevy Volt, the concept of cellulosic ethanol is very attractive, but the reality is expensive and impractical.

Expense and practicality are hardly matters of concern to environmentalists though. Environmentalists prefer the pixie dust approach to dealing with energy policy: if they believe hard enough, their wishes will come true. They wanted cellulosic ethanol and once Democrats took control of Congress after the 2006 elections, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid duly granted their wish. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 mandated the use of certain minimum quantities of cellulosic ethanol that started at 100 million gallons in 2009 and ends at 16 billion gallons is 2022. (Annual US gasoline sales are about 130 billion gallons, by way of comparison). In 2011, oil companies were mandated to sell at least 250 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol.

This was a problem for oil companies, because there are no plants currently producing cellulosic ethanol. And so, using her authority under the Clean Air Act, USEPA Administrator Lisa Jackson duly issued penalty demands of $6.8 million to oil companies for not using a non-existent fuel. If the rallying cry in 1776 was “No Taxation Without Representation!”, perhaps the equivalent in 2011 ought to be “No Penalty Without Reality!”

Interestingly, the act that started this chain of ridiculousness included an alternative that allowed companies to actually pay a tax – in the form of “credits,” whose price the EPA would set – in lieu of actually buying cellulosic ethanol. In EPA-land, this would be an alternative form of compliance, even though it would do absolutely nothing to address the concerns about greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on foreign oil that the act supposedly solved. The “credit” scheme smells, in other words, like a back-door carbon tax cleverly disguised in a “green” bill that Democrats pushed through and the all-too-eager-too-please George W. Bush dutifully signed.

When oil companies didn’t bite at the credit deal, Jackson decided to get the cash anyway, in the form of the fines that the EPA is allowed to levy thanks to the power that Congress has given this out-of-control agency. Indeed, the fines could have been a lot larger, but when going after big companies that might fight back, the EPA has to balance what they figure they can get without a prolonged court battle versus the time and expense of going through such a judicial exercise. In the grand scheme of things, one expects that the oil companies will do the same math and decide it’s easier to pay the EPA than to pay yet another army of lawyers. If that sounds a lot like legal racketeering, it’s probably because it is.

Did the EPA have to demand penalties in this case? No. That was a choice and, given the extreme leftist ideology of this administration and its EPA chief and given Obama’s desperate need to generate revenue by any means possible, it’s sadly no surprise that Lisa Jackson did what she did. But it’s beyond reason that we ever got to this point in the first place. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 gave the EPA administrator the power to waive or change the requirements for cellulosic ethanol if supplies were not available or if the cost was too high. Jackson could have – and should have – waived the requirement, but she chose not to.

There are those who would counter the equity and reasonableness arguments presented above by saying that the EPA should be forcing technological advancements and that these kinds of penalties accomplish that end. To this I would respond: nice thought, but perhaps you should step over here into the real world for a moment.

First of all, oil companies are not going to be the ones to develop cheap means of producing cellulosic ethanol. Oil companies employ geologists and engineers; they know about refining and exploration. They don’t have the people or the expertise to explore complex bio-chemical processes. There are companies out there with that kind of expertise and the government is pumping hundreds of millions of our tax dollars into them in the effort to discover this latest version of the energy world’s Holy Grail. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 alone included $50 million in grant funding specifically targeted toward cellulosic ethanol research. Levying punitive fines on oil companies to penalize them for the failures of all that government-mandated and funded research makes no sense. But, the EPA and the Obama administration have long since abandoned common sense altogether.

Certainly hasn’t been the best week for Americans, especially the unemployed – Obama stopped the Keystone Pipeline in its tracks, conveniently putting any decision on the pipeline off until 2013. Of course he’s already been told by Stephen Harper, the Canadianprime minister that Canada won’t wait on Obama; they will make a deal with someone else (probably China.)

Obama slapped Ohio around delaying their shale gas drilling by cancelling a mineral lease auction for Wayne National Forest (WNF.) EPA is messing with our minds, our money and our jobs – Obama gave the lame excuse that he wants EPA to study the effects of hydraulic fracturing. Hydraulic Fracturing has been around since the 1940’s

The University of Texas at Austin’s Energy Institute said no direct links to water contamination due to the hydraulic fracturing in their preliminary study.

EPA did a study of hydraulic fracturing in 2004 and found nothing to link it to water contamination. Now EPA wants three years to revisit the subject, which means we’ve just lost thousands of jobs due to Obama and EPA.

As we all know, Obama also stopped the creation of 100,000 jobs on the Gulf Coast, because he doesn’t want new energy production on his watch. He wants us to remain energy dependent on Middle Eastern Oil and George Soros (his bud and puppeteer.) George is the guy who received a huge hunk of our money for Petrobras in Brazil.

Makes one wonder about the real story behind the BP oil spill – perfect timing for an oil spill so off sure drilling could be stopped and thousands of jobs lost – sounds like the same Obama strategy used with Fast and Furious in a scheme to control America’s right to bear arms.

Eric Holder, the Attorney General should have removed from office a year ago because of the corrupt, illegal and deadly “Fast and Furious” gunrunner operation; Eric is still foot loose and fancy free. He has called for review of all states that have Voter ID laws in place before the 2012 Presidential Election. Basically the States believe it takes more than a water bill to prove one’s identification.

ACORN was quite a problem at the polls in 2008 if you remember and it seems reasonable to put a stop to ACORN’s illegal activities at the polls. Guess that’s why Democrats are shaking in their shoes – not going to be so easy to rig the Presidential Election for 2012.

They sound like a bunch of raving lunatics when they say laws requiring voter ID will prevent millions from voting. If in fact there are millions out their without identification, they must be counting criminals, felons, illegal aliens and all the other junk yard dogs. DEMS can relax; those without ID’s have 11 months to secure an ID; so I guess there really isn’t any problem.

This brings us to some of Obama’s best friends, Jeffrey Immelt, head of Obama’s Job Counsel and CEO of GE not only weasels out of GE’s tax obligations, they’re moving more of their GE infrastructure to China. General Electric, the nation’s largest industrial company, reports net earnings for the third quarter of $3.2 billion, up 57 percent from the same period in 2010. Go figure, they’re on our turf, avoiding their tax obligations and stealing our jobs.

Ironic that Obama is out campaigning using class warfare saying the wealthy should pay their fair share. This is a parallel to the Obamacare vouchers – guess Obama’s friends receive immunity from their tax obligations.

Last but not least on this weeks “person of interest” is NJ past Governor John Corzine (former CEO of MF Global. Obama and Biden touted Jon as the smartest man they know, so smart in fact he helped orchestrate the “redistribution” of taxpayer’s stimulus package. The smartest man they know just lost 1.2 billion dollars belonging to MF Global investors – easy come easy go!

“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does NOT mean to stand by the President or, any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is un-patriotic not to oppose him, to the exact extent that by inefficiency or, otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In any event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth - whether about the President or anyone else - save in the rare cases where this would make known to the enemy information of military value which would otherwise be unknown to him.”
~THEODORE ROOSEVELT~

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